In yesterday’s post, I explained how I was recently able to extend my nightly sleep from my usual four hours to seven. I also mentioned that the previous night I had reverted back to four.
Last night, thankfully, I resumed my progress, getting seven and a half hours of sleep.
I believe what made the difference was prayer and that God answered my prayer for sleep because I prayed more properly than I have in the past.
Last night I did not just submit a request to heaven, treating God like a wish-granting genie. Instead, following Jesus’s model prayer known as the Lord’s Prayer, I began with adoration, praising and thanking God for the restorative blessing of sleep. I then confessed my relevant fault: the years I neglected to address my sleep deficiency. Only then did I ask God for a good night’s sleep.
Adoration, reconciliation, petition. I think that sequence is a good one, because it orients one’s heart properly before issuing an ask.
First you set your heart on loving God and appreciating His wondrous works.
That prepares you to acknowledge how insufficiently you have made use of, and thus honored, such splendid gifts. You recognize that you are a major co-author of your own deprivation, your own need.
So when you ask God to fill that need, you do so, not with a sense of entitlement or woe-is-me desperation, but with a properly humble attitude of contrition and a greater resolve to repent of your sins and reconcile your ways with God’s ways: to work, not against, but with God as He helps you.
God helps those who help themselves by aligning themselves with His will. And we can align ourselves with God’s will by communing with Him through prayer.